To lay the dead amid blooming nature and fair flowers has been and is
natural to men. The symbolism is most natural, deep, and beautiful,
expressing the possibility of life and even of advance in the life
after apparent decay. There is something very pathetic in so eager a
grasping after some stay for hope.
All these natural symbols are insufficient. They are not proofs, they
are only pretty analogies. But they are all that men have on which to
build their hopes as to a future life apart from Christ. That future
was vague, a region for hopes and wishes or fears, not for certainty, a
region for poetic fancies. The thoughts of it were very faintly
operative. Men asked, Shall we live again? Conscience seemed to answer,
Yes! The instinct of immortality in men's souls grasped at these things
as proofs of what it believed without them, but there was no clear
light.